Temne People - Culture

Culture

Today, the Temne are rice farmers, fishermen, and traders. Temne culture revolves around the paramount chiefs, and the secret societies, especially the men's Poro society and the women's Bondo society. The most important Temne rituals focus on the coronation and funerals of paramount chiefs and the initiation of new secret society members. Most Temnes are staunch Muslims though, like other West Africans, they combine their Islamic faith with a strong adherence to traditional African religious beliefs and practices.

Temne culture places great emphasis on individualism, hard work, and personal initiative. Indeed, Sierra Leoneans sometimes refer to their Temne neighbors affectionately as "Germans" because of their reputation for aggressiveness.

Read more about this topic:  Temne People

Famous quotes containing the word culture:

    A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
    Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)

    Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.
    Mao Zedong (1893–1976)